People vary greatly in their ability to judge how others see them, Chris, and in their ability to recognise emotional responses in others. The distribution of these subtle faculties of emotional intelligence are much like the spread across populations of cognitive intelligence (IQ), and neither of these relate to character or other personality attributes.

Some people are very good at deconstructing complex sentences, others aren’t. Some people are very skilled at manipulating objects in space, others are ‘clumsy’. Some people have excellent listening skills, others of otherwise superior intelligence have very poor recall of what they’ve heard, however attentively they try to listen (I am one such).

Few of us do full justice to the diversity of the species, and some (sadly) tend to assume that people are, or ought to be, “like me/us”; and if they aren’t they’re deficient or thick.

When people ask for feedback I think one’s default position should be to respect the validity of the request, and the courage it takes to make it. The world might be a better place if we all tried to admit this as a useful and constructive rule of thumb.

Hi Simon
My remarks were not aimed at you, I would like to think that we could have some sort of ‘discussion’ if things got so bad.
It’s more that in some recent posts someone was quite aggresive for no reason whatsoever to something I posted. In fact the person concerned ‘quoted’ my posts by substituting their own words rather than mine , and also posted just parts of my posts that changed totally the context. I objected to this (as most of us would) and received some good advice from other members.
I followed their advice and now try hard not to react.
I am on here because I find that generally, even if we have different opinions (that’s normal) we can at least try to help out others where possible.
Snide remarks, clever remarks and general put downs don’t work for me. At the end of the day we are all immigrants here, so what if sometimes the spelling, grammar isn’t correct? Is it really important? I like lively open discussions and thankfully we have more of these than the negative kind. However I do keep my head down when I think the pace is too aggresive for my taste